Silencing “those” Facebook friends

We all have “those” Facebook friends. You know — the kind that post a big flowery picture with text splattered across it that is supposed to inspire you, but it really says “I’m too much of a lemming to type anything special or personal here, so I will regurgitate re-share this hostile-to-the-sight-impaired text-image monstrosity.” We also have those folks, typically family members, that would kick up a drama-storm if you unfriended them, but who constantly post political messages with the implication that a proclamation on [polarizing topic] blasted to your newsfeed is going to be much more convincing than a dialogue, debate, or reasoned discussion.

About a week ago a Facebook friend, Jeff, pointed out a feature that I had not seen before. There is a way to squelch the number of posts you see from a given person to “just the important stuff.” As best as I can tell, this applies across everything: the website, the iPhone App, and Flipboard. I didn’t get around to trying it for a couple of days and once it scrolled back that far it was a little difficult to find. And that is when an idea struck!

I could use the very same annoying image macro style to help people propagate by re-sharing the very instructions to tame said image macros. All I needed was an inspiring nature background (such as this autumn canopy from iStockPhoto) a flowery font like Papyrus, and a few screenshots. Behold:

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Brian Enigma

Brian Enigma is a Portlander, manipulator of atoms & bits, minor-league blogger, and all-around great guy. He typically writes about the interesting “maker” projects he's working on, but sometimes veers off into puzzles, software, games, local news, and current events.
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